Time for a special prosecutor on IRS after “lost” e-mails?

posted at 2:31 pm on June 14, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

It’s been more than 400 days since the IRS targeting scandal broke, and longer than that since the Inspector General started its probe of the tax-exempt office and their alleged political bias. Members of Congress had asked IRS officials more than two years ago about puzzling delays in applications from conservative groups. Yet, according to the Obama administration, only yesterday did the IRS get around to confirming that a supposed computer crash had wiped out two years of e-mail history from Lois Lerner and her group, after months of being under subpoena to supply it.

Congressional investigators are fuming over revelations that the Internal Revenue Service has lost a trove of emails to and from a central figure in the agency’s tea party controversy.

The IRS said Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in 2011, wiping out an untold number of emails that were being sought by congressional investigators. The investigators want to see all of Lerner’s emails from 2009 to 2013 as part of their probe into the way agents handled applications for tax-exempt status by tea party and other conservative groups. …

“Do they really expect the American people to believe that, after having withheld these emails for a year, they’re just now realizing the most critical time period is missing?” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “If there wasn’t nefarious conduct that went much higher than Lois Lerner in the IRS targeting scandal, why are they playing these games?” …

If anyone in the Obama administration outside the agency was involved, investigators were hoping for clues in Lerner’s emails.

“The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’ response to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general.”

This excuse doesn’t even make sense, as anyone who has experience in network and e-mail administration can easily attest. E-mail records aren’t preserved only on individual computers, but on network servers. The relevant files would be kept on the servers or on backup media, which would have data for the whole organization and not just a single user. That was true when I did network administration in the early 1990s, and it’s most certainly even more true now. And it’s especially true in organizations that require data storage and full retrieval capacity by statute — such as federal agencies like the IRS.

If such a crash occurred, it would have affected much more than just Lerner — and would have produced a significant response when it happened. Gabriel Malor wonders where the records of such a failure are:

IRS produced the IT department and Helpdesk logs to document Lerner's "computer crash," right? Right?

By the way, the FBI does great work in restoring data from crashed hard drives. They should also be able to restore most if not all of Lois Lerner’s e-mails in and out of the IRS, if the IRS’ nonsensical claims that this data loss only affected Lerner are even remotely true, by drilling into the archives of every other person’s e-mail in Treasury, Justice, and the White House. After all, Lerner didn’t just post notes on a bulletin board, but sent e-mails to others and had replies back from them. I’d bet that the FBI would do that in a significant criminal investigation if necessary, and the IRS would do it in a heartbeat if it suspected a corporation of tax evasion and was told that the emails for one particular executive were “lost.”

A sloppy mistake, the government calls it, but you couldn’t blame a person for suspecting a cover-up — the loss of an untold number of emails to and from the central figure in the IRS tea party controversy. And, because the public’s trust is a fragile gift that the White House has frittered away in a series of second-term missteps, President Obama needs to act.

If the IRS can’t find the emails, maybe a special prosecutor can. …

The White House is stonewalling the IRS investigation. The most benign explanation is that Obama’s team is politically expedient and arrogant, which makes them desperate to change the subject, and convinced of their institutional innocence. That’s bad enough. But without a fiercely independent investigation, we shouldn’t assume the explanation is benign.

I’m old enough to remember when Karl Rove’s use of his personal e-mail to get around the retention requirements for the Bush administration was bandied about as nearly an impeachable offense. Now we have this laughable excuse for not producing records in a case of abuse of executive power against political opponents of the President. Somehow, it’s a little difficult for people to even consider that the stonewalling is benign, let alone the insult to the intelligence that this excuse is.

I’m also old enough to remember when an 18.5-minute gap on a tape was prima facie evidence of obstruction of justice. So is Roger Kimball, for that matter, who asks which is worse — 18.5 minutes of erased tape, or two years of erased e-mails?

Breaking on Hot Air

Blowback

Note from Hot Air management: This section is for comments from Hot Air's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Hot Air management agrees with or otherwise endorses any particular comment just because we let it stand. A reminder: Anyone who fails to comply with our terms of use may lose their posting privilege.

I’d welcome a special prosecutor in on this IRS scandal. Issa’s a wealthy businessman kind of fumbling along in this investigation. I’m thinking a reason why the special prosecutor hasn’t already been named is that there are a few establishment Republicans in the mix (even Boehner’s a possibility) that will bubble to the surface with the likes of Cummings, Levin and Schumer who have been sicking the IRS and the FBI on the Tea Party groups.

I wouldn’t trust Eric Holder any farther than I could watch him drop through a scaffold after a fair and impartial trial.

If we recover the Senate, we will have the leverage of the purse to work with, but we will have to choose our battles there, too. The press may be wavering a bit, but they will not abandon the Democrats in a showdown, and Obama has nothing at all to lose.

So we can probably get away with ONE shutdown showdown, we need to have all our leverage in the budget package at that time. Unfortunately, even a public that has turned on Obama will not tolerate the shutting down of government repeatedly to accomplish political goals.

Clinton was unpopular going into the 1995 shutdown battles, too, but he was more popular coming out of them even though we achieved most of what we demanded.

Sorry to tell you, but emails are stored on your network server as well as individual PC’s. So, did both machines crash? What about the backup tapes? Were they destroyed as well? The IRS does do backups, right? I’m not buying this but what is the House going to do about it? Gowdy hasn’t even convened one meeting yet!

Issa sucks! He is definitely part of the problem. He likes grandstanding once in a while, but seems to have no intention of getting to the bottom on this or any other investigation he’s led. He is obviously in on the whole scam. If we were going to hear this latest lie, it should have been revealed a year ago. Issa is slow-pedaling for the administration.

And, of course, that whole LIST of stuff to impeach Obama with, since he’s now feels that he’s twice the Teflon president of Reagan. And the press went after Reagan while this one layers on more Teflon.

The administration is lawless and corrupt.
This is what happens when you elect a racist and stealth communist.
Which begs the question of what actually occurred during Obama’s college and post-graduate years and who funded him. The answers to how this criminal became president lie there.

You know, I was thinking about this half-baked claim of theirs. Suppose I have an email exchange going on with my boss over a period of time. These exchanges include a couple of other people via fwd and cc’d messages. So my computer “crashes” and these messages are no longer on my computer. That’s baloney, because just because I can no longer log into my email on MY computer, I can go to the library and log in, or buy a new computer and log in, the messages will still be there on some server somewhere. So will all the exchanges I made, so will the fwd and cc’d messages. To claim that emails have just disappeared off not only her computer, but the mailboxes of EVERYONE she sent and received email from is ridiculous. I once had DELETED mail from a few years back retrieved from a server at work because I needed a receipt that I had deleted.

The article says that no one believes that, “Needless to say, members of Congress aren’t buying this latest dog-ate-my-homework excuse:…………..” Well, my guess is that many Democrats are going to look the other way and not call for a special prosecutor. Special prosecutors have been needed for some time in this scandal and others.

Obama’s low-life lying flunkies know they are protected by a super non-transparent, lying president that is protected by the Senate democrats (and MSM) that he knows won’t impeach him. If he can’t be impeached, well…

Blame these protective senate democrats, they are the source of Obama’s power for ever more evil.

Expect zero action from the House. They like the idea of a tyrannical government. Boehner , McCarthy , Ryan are all complicit in this scandal. They will serve up harsh sounding platitudes, but will take no action to stop lawlessness.

I wonder if the Senate will be much different under McConnell. I expect more of the same. The growth of government will not be checked.

And yet these criminal actions still go unprosecuted and unpunished because we are a nation of laws, right? Repeat after me; jury nullification. If it isn’t a crime for federal pukes, it isn;t a crime anywhere.

And yet these criminal actions still go unprosecuted and unpunished because we are a nation of laws, right? Repeat after me; jury nullification. If it isn’t a crime for federal pukes, it isn;t a crime anywhere.

earlgrey on June 16, 2014 at 10:55 AM

Laws are not for Democrats. They are only for Republicans.

To believe any thing else you have to live in the past.

We aren’t a nation of laws. We are a nation of whims.

Our whole current morality is based on what is in style at this moment.

SPCA should step in and find a way to cite and incarcerate IRS employees for “Animal Cruelty”. Training Homework eating dogs to also eat Tax Returns and emails is cruel and possibly endangering the animal.

Because, we know “Homework Eating” pets are capable of digesting pencil and pen ink. However, there are no Government studies showing the impact to dogs or other animals consuming government ink, watermarks, and paper would have.